Field Notes: The Ghost on the Canal
Portraits in contemporary ethnography
Anthropology starts with description. In this series of vignettes, portraits and snapshots we will be building up a picture of the present, field notes - some as fiction, some as truth, all based in experience. Contemporary life is rich with the absurd and with parallel lives, I hope you find this project enjoyable and interesting. All names have been changed.
What will follow is a roughly faithful transcription of a monologue by the subject of a previous study. I had recorded it on paper in note form two years ago but never got around to exploring it in detail. As an aside - making Britain’s canals into a long-term project of inquiry has proved incredibly challenging, given their unique aspects and often itinerant userbase. Thus the nuclei of the entire work is laid out here using anecdotes, but each deserves a more thorough treatment when funding allows.
Subject: Matt, male, late 20s, white British.
No, the canals were never a creepy place to live near, not at all. There were lots of tourist boats that would moor for a day or two, and I used to enjoy waving to people as I came home from school along the towpath. It was properly overgrown in the summer, alive with bees, I’d even saw a kingfisher if I was lucky! Sometimes the old guys would stay put for a few weeks, you got to know them as they'd come back maybe once a year or so. Once an old timer was walking back across the lock with a metal detector. I was so fascinated, I was like nine, maybe ten years old. He stopped and showed it to me, then he waved it around on the ground and it made all those noises and he stopped and pulled a real bullet out of the dirt. He gave it to me, I was so excited, I kept it for years. It wasn’t until I was an adult that it dawned on me he probably just had it in his pocket and pretended to find it.
Anyway. So, creepy isn’t the right word, but there was one guy. Some people called him Akker, or Akky? We just called him the Boat Man. He lived on a real wrecked old barge, and he always had heaps of stuff on his patch of the bank and path. He had an old dog tied up on the mooring posts or on the back of the boat, would always bark at everyone. He was always collecting old computers, wires, cables and bits of things - and he would sometimes make a bonfire at the back of mum’s pony field and throw all the plastic wiring onto it. Me and my mates would watch sometimes, he didn’t care if we stood a way off with our bikes. The fire would go crazy colours when the wires burnt, purple and green and blue, the smoke was horrible though, smelt so bad! He never seemed to care, he would light up his cigarette off a bit of burning wire and stick his face into the whole thing, poking and prodding until the plastic was gone, then he’d use a garden fork and throw everything off as fast as he could.
He never had a shirt on from what I remember, he looked like he used to be really strong, with faded old tattoos. I sometimes would ask mum why she let him on the field, she told me that everyone said he was from South Africa and used to be a soldier in a war with some other African country, and that he was addicted to amphetamines because the army actually gave them to their men to stay awake all night!
I never actually spoke to him though, he was quite scary as a kid, like we’d dare each other sometimes to sneak up and touch his boat. One time he came running down the towpath with a machete and we absolutely legged it. He probably wouldn’t have hurt us for real, but it was properly terrifying. Sometimes his boat was empty for weeks, then he’d come back with a massive heap of junk. Sometimes you’d hear him play drum’n’bass music through some shitty speaker. He never really bothered anyone I guess, which is why he stayed around. I don’t know where he is now, probably dead, he was pretty old.
Tracking down Acker/Boat Man, or even anyone else who knew him was going to be difficult. To begin with I started walking up and down the towpaths around Matt’s childhood house. There was a single step lock, a footbridge and a fairly long tunnel within a few miles of each other. This canal was only recently connected to the wider network, and was likely isolated for a long time. The Canal & River Trust has cleared and dredged hundreds of miles of canal sections in recent years, so the old canal of Matt’s youth may have substantially changed.
After walking the length a number of times I began talking to boaters and tourists who had moored up. Without a doubt the full time canal dwellers have a huge stock of folk-memory which has barely been explored or documented. I’ve included some choice examples from informal interviews.
Me dad grew up on the boats, but had his family in a house. I came back to it after work failed, just a nicer pace of life. Was a lot harder back in the day though, no electric lights, I think dad was just old enough to remember the last of the boat gypsies flogging coal off their little butty. Go back farther and it was all donkeys of course on the towpaths, the eldest lad walking em up and down the cut, feeding em.
Yes, if you want solar panels it works well enough, some boaters also put them little wind turbines up. You have to mess around with twelve volt inverters though, square waves were always cheaper for just running a kettle and charging a phone. Some guys get really into the electrical side of it all, proper nerds! I know one bloke who builds twelve volt power tools, drills, what have you. He went to that training place in Wales - CAT - now he can rig up whatever you want, he probably cheers when there’s a power cut in town!
One thing that stood out to me after a while was the artwork style on many of the permanent houseboaters. A sort of bright, chocolate box style (Roses & Castles) on the doors and objects which adorned the rooves and decks. I learnt through conversation that this niche painting style is still well preserved, and some people even make a living through commissions.
Many who choose to live on the canals full time come across as escapees, people fleeing city and contemporary life. The canals are often centrally located within towns and urban areas, but are somehow overlooked, and people sail up and down without feeling the same pressure and pace. That said, several mentioned burglaries and thefts and almost all of those I spoke to owned a dog or two. One is not a ‘real boater’ until the dog has chased a cyclist miles down the towpath.
I gathered enough descriptive anecdotes of canal life to fill a book - watching a cow give birth, stopping for a pint at a waterside pub, boats crashing into kayakers, getting the moor rope tangled around your leg and being dragged underwater, the many creative ways of fixing an engine on the cheap, a guy who bred ferrets on his boat, the endless battles over CRT cruising licenses and facilities. But in all this rich slice of life, I never heard about Boat Man. No-one seemed to remember him, or cared to tell me. The canals have hundreds of ghosts and water-wights - screams in tunnels, restless drowned children, bargemen eternally walking the cut, the clanking of the windlass on locks - and perhaps my man had gone to join them. One set of stories I found particularly haunting were about the little boys employed to lie on their backs on top of the old commercial narrow barges, and literally walk the boats through miles of pitch black tunnel using their legs. It still makes me shudder to imagine those boys being crushed and scraped against the cold brickwork when the passageways started to shrink, or when a boat rocked them overboard.
Many weeks after returning back from the canals I received a voicemail from Matt, evidently our lines of communication had been failing to meet for a while now, but he did have something to say.
Hey man, so uh yeah I tried phoning before about the uh conversation we had, about the canals and er Boat Man, I don’t know if you remember? Well I did go to see my mum recently and I remembered that you were interested in what happened to Boat Man, so I asked her. She uh, told me that he disappeared not long after I went to uni. She said that he started getting bothered by travelers, pikey lads, that they were nicking stuff off his boat and taking scrap, and he would go after them and sometimes there were fights. He was hard as nails but he was only one bloke. She said something about a gypsy horse getting loose one time and then his boat got on fire and he moved on, she didn’t know. Sorry its not much man, maybe we’ll catch up some other time? Hope all’s well?